RTS Papers / Preaching Lab 1 / Fall 2016
A sermon on Genesis 4:1-16
Introduction
The world is full of stories about brother against brother. Most famous perhaps was the Roman myth of Romulus killing his brother Remus. That’s how Rome supposedly got its name: the “eternal city” founded on bad blood between brothers. Our movies from Hollywood are still filled with the scenes of petty rivalries between blood relatives. And in fact, “brother against brother” is more than a story. It is also a slogan used especially in the context of civil war. People willing to go against the old adage that “Blood is thicker than water.”
But what if I told you that all this bad blood always goes together with bad worship? And I don’t mean any subjective opinion about “worship style” or anything like that. I mean something that God Himself must have made very clear from all the way back in the beginning of the Bible. Coming to our story today, in Genesis 4, we will recall that Adam and Eve are now removed from the Garden of Eden. Sin is in the world. The curse is in effect. And in this text we have bad worship and bad blood together between the first two brothers.
Big Idea: Since bad blood and false worship go together, we must seek a true worship from a better blood.
Doctrine
I. Since bad blood presumes God’s blessing, we should look closer into the promise.
Look first at what Eve does here: Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, “I have gotten a man with the help of the LORD (1). So Cain is the new hope. We remember the promise from Genesis 3:15. There would be a Seed: an Offspring of the woman. Here he is! That’s a perfectly understandable conclusion by Eve. But notice how she expresses this joy in the midst of the fall. I HAVE GOTTEN A MAN … with the LORD’s help. Commentators notice presumption here. God helps those who help themselves. Cain’s name means “acquire” or “gotten,” whereas Abel’s means “vapor” or “breath” signaling to us the shortness of his life. And to Eve? We don’t really know. Maybe Abel was only an afterthought. Maybe in despair over the fall, she put a lot of thought into it. It is still presumption. But it is not the only presumption.
As readers we have a presumption of our own. We might get the idea that this is the way God always does things. He passes on the covenant blessing through family ties and first-born sons. Don’t we believe that? Yes we do. But the Bible tells us to believe more than that. Read on in Genesis and beyond, and you will see that the same God who passes on his blessing through bloodlines also has a knack for upsetting the natural birth-order, with an Isaac over Ishmael, a Jacob over Esau, a Judah over the three elder brothers, and a David over the older, more impressive sons of Jesse.
Moses moves quickly in the story again. The two boys grow up. Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain a worker of the ground (2b). You may remember that David was a shepherd, and he was despised among his brothers. This story doesn’t give us many details inside the brotherly rivalry of Cain and Abel, but it is pretty clear that the offering in this story was the last straw. Something that characterized their whole lives came between them.
Again, since bad blood presumes God’s blessing, we should look closer into the promise. But presumption doesn’t just lead to wrong answers of tests in school, or in a game of Trivial Pursuit. When we are talking about God promising you life when you’re dead, to presume upon your own nature and your own doings is not going to end well in the rest of life. The bad blood that presumes on God’s blessing is going to personally relate to God how?
II. Since bad blood despises God’s worship, we should give God only our best.
There has never been a time or place on planet earth where the specifics of worship didn’t matter, as J. Ligon Duncan remarked about this passage — this “is before the moral law is expounded at Sinai. It is in no way connected to the tabernacle worship of Exodus or to the levitical system.” In other words, we can’t say about right worship in the Bible that specifics were only for the Old Testament Jews. Not so! Way before the law of Moses, for all mankind, over this bad blood, God is specifically declaring BAD WORSHIP! But how so? What was so bad about this worship?
Some people think it was in the blood. Well I think it was in the blood, but not in the way they mean it. What some people mean is that the reason God accepted Abel’s sacrifice and not Cain’s was that Abel’s was the sacrifice of an animal. He brought blood. That represents the sacrifice of Jesus. Cain’s sacrifice was less like the gospel. There are two reasons to reject that view. First, the New Testament verses that refer to this don’t go there; second, there were other offerings in the Old Covenant worship system — other than the bloody sacrifices of animals. And then there is a third reason that can be gleaned directly from this text: In the course of time Cain brought to the LORD an offering of the fruit of the ground, and Abel also brought of the firstborn of his flock and of their fat portions (3-4a).
The suggestion is that unlike Abel, Cain, the firstborn, doesn’t give his firstfruits. One commentator calls the problem “Tokenism” — in other words, the leftovers. Like another firstborn later on, named Esau, Cain had come to despise the promises of God.
So this bad blood wasn’t over the good blood in Abel’s sacrifice. There wasn’t any. The author of Hebrews tells us that “it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins” (10:4). Abel’s sacrifice wasn’t Cain’s problem. God’s pleasure in Abel wasn’t Cain’s problem. Cain’s physical things were not even Cain’s problem. Something boiling in Cain’s heart was the problem.
So, to review: (1) since bad blood presumes God’s blessing, we should look closer into the promise; (2) Since bad blood despises God’s worship, we should give God only our best. Abel did; Cain didn’t. And so we have the first of what we call “the worship wars.”
III. Since bad blood murders God’s image, we should guard against our violent hearts.
“We should not be like Cain,” John says, “who was of the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own deeds were evil and his brother’s righteous” (1 Jn. 3:12). That was the New Testament magnifying glass on history’s first murder. God had a direct, immediate, high-powered, looking glass into Cain’s heart on the spot. In the act, on the eve of destruction, in the spiritual cells of the bad blood as it rushed toward its target of rage. And does God sit back at the sight of his creature rushing headlong in this way? No. Verses 6 and 7 give us God’s searching magnifying glass of conviction.
The LORD said to Cain, “Why are you angry, and why has your face fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is contrary to you, but you must rule over it” (6-7).
Sin is personified. It is animated in crouching (think of a tiger stalking its prey), but then there is an intelligent design in that it has “desire.” That makes this a great enemy within. It is sin that “wages war against your soul.” So what’s the connection? If this bad-blooded enemy is sin inside of us, then it was inside of Abel too. And yet we read of “the blood of righteous Abel” (Mat. 23:35). It would take a massive book, I think, to make the case that bad worship boils the blood that is already bad. But do I really mean to say that the consequences of falling away from the true worship of God are so bad that they lead us to murder the image of God? Really? There is a statement in John’s letter: “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen” (1 Jn. 4:20).
If we lose sight of God, we lose sight of the image of God. If our hearts grow cold toward God, our hearts grow cold to the image of God. If we would think nothing of stealing glory from God, then we would think nothing of stealing life from our brother.
Cain’s premeditation is evident here, since the presence of the LORD returns to ask the question, and then Cain’s impertinent response is all we need to see the depths that his heart had sunk. Pure hatred against both God and man. The two are inseparable.
(1) since bad blood presumes God’s blessing, we should look closer into the promise; (2) Since bad blood despises God’s worship, we should give God only our best. (3) Since bad blood murders God’s image, we should guard against our violent hearts. When our violations of the first table of the law (what we owe directly to God) spill over into our violations of the second table of the law (how we treat our brothers) we get exile. We get kicked out of the land of the living. But even getting sent packing has its purpose in God’s story.
IV. Since bad blood wanders God’s earth, we should use this patient exile to repent.
Cain is cut off from his work, his home, and his God. It is just like his parents, Adam and Eve, when they disobeyed God. They were punished by being cut off from their work, their home, and their God. And just as Adam and Eve did not physically die on that day, so Cain lives on in this life. The Scripture says “The soul who sins shall die” (Ezk. 18:4). And yet, there is a stay of execution. There is a time to repent. Did you ever notice that you were not utterly destroyed by God the very first time you sinned? And haven’t you noticed that you were not killed by Him each time you sinned after that? That “his mercies … are new every morning” (Lam. 3:22, 23).
Cain is punished by exile — Nod means “wandering” — but it is a patient exile. But what is Cain’s focus? “Cain said to the LORD, ‘My punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, you have driven me today away from the ground, and from your face I shall be hidden. I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me’” (13-14). What a totally inappropriate pity party! This from the man who asked if he was his brother’s keeper — now he looks for a keeper of his own! This is not true repentance. And yet, God does not kill him right then and there. A kind and patient exile. Yes — a curse — but a chance to turn, perhaps, one day.
And so we should always take note, Paul says, of “the kindness and severity of God: severity toward those who have fallen, but God’s kindness to you, provided you continue in his kindness. Otherwise you too will be cut off” and “God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance.” So this is what we learn from this story:
(1) since bad blood presumes God’s blessing, we should look closer into the promise; (2) Since bad blood despises God’s worship, we should give God only our best; (3) Since bad blood murders God’s image, we should guard against our violent hearts; and (4) Since bad blood wanders God’s earth, we should use this patient exile to repent.
* * *
There are two clear ways to apply this to our own lives today. If we see that bad blood and false worship go together, and if we get out of that that we must seek a true worship from a better blood, what do we really mean by it? How does this affect us today?
1. Like Abel, we should worship the right way by faith.
This speaks to right worship today. Listen again to the author of Hebrews.
By faith Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain, through which he was commended as righteous, God commending him by accepting his gifts. And through his faith, though he died, he still speaks (Heb. 11:4).
Cain isn’t the only object lesson here. Abel’s action “still speaks,” the Bible says. By faith we bring God our best. We believe in God’s promises to the point where we do not withhold anything that God deserves or anything that God commands. When we do withhold those, there is a lack of faith. We cling to “our things” or to “ways of doing church” because we don’t trust God for the results. Hopefully now we can see the connection between God-pleasing faith and God-pleasing worship. However,
2. Like Abel, by that same faith, we should look past our offering to Christ’s offering.
Right worship matters and no sinner will ever give that to God as much as He deserves. So we have a problem. Our right worship is still rising out of bad blood. And so we look back to the story of the Bible. And we see that, just as the firstborn, Cain, rose up and killed his brother who had pleased God, so the firstborn, Israel, rose up and killed one of their brethren who alone pleased God perfectly. In both cases, a jealousy flowed from the bad blood of false worship; and in both cases, the Bible tells us that the blood of the innocent, in some way, rose upward into heaven, toward God.
But there was also a very, very important difference between the blood of Abel and the blood of Jesus.
In one of those brother against brother movies that my wife and I watched, years ago now — Legends of the Fall — at the very end, Brad Pitt’s character, Tristan, runs into a bear in the wilderness and the movie ends abruptly and seemingly without meaning, and yet the narrator has the nerve to say, “It was a good death.” Good death! That was my wife’s reaction anyway. Maybe that’s your reaction to the end of this story, if we didn’t know anything else, if the credits rolled here.
Certainly through the eyes of the flesh, Adam and Eve probably didn’t discover their son’s body and turn to each other and say, dispassionately, “It was a good death.” This first death certainly could not be a good death. No death ever since could possibly be a good death — unless, that is, there was another, and it was an immeasurably good death. And that is exactly what the author of Hebrews says, when we come “to Jesus … and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel” (12:24). And how does Paul describe the good death of Jesus? As “a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (Eph. 5:2).
Good blood matters. We don’t have it. Jesus does.
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